A comic novel featuring a Jewish priest, his green-eyed Irish mistress and the atheist retired major who is his best friend, a crazed American scholar and a dodgy Romanian rare book dealer, with a parallel story involving an 18th century rabbi and a possible undiscovered edition of Shakespeare. So what's not to like?

OK, you probably won't enjoy this if you are a pious Roman Catholic or Jew without a sense of humour, but for the rest of us it is a very entertaining little novel, with a few more serious ideas tucked away here and there. ( )